This morning I had to stop at a drug store in which all the pharmacists know and likely pity me by sight.
To look at the cheerful carnation pink and red of Valentine’s Day displays is almost as sobering as it was to walk into a stationery store last June and come face-to-face with the Father’s Day cards. I wheeled around and hastened back out the door as if the cards might swoop down and attack like Alfred Hitchcock fowl–a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens, a sedge of bitterns. (I am quite the fan of “terms of venery.”)
I do realize this “woe-is-me” me is not my most attractive self, but there you have it.
Last Valentine’s Day, Jim handed me a box wrapped in shiny Boston Celtics green. It matched the boxes I had seen and knew contained necklaces he carefully had chosen as birthday gifts for our two daughters during his last winter with us.
First, I had presented him with humble and transient treasures: a heart-shaped cookie and some soap he had requested. He gave me a diamond necklace. We gave each other cards in which we had both included variations on the phrase that we did not know where to begin. Of course we both meant that we did not know how to end.
He had printed out a picture of the two of us on our last family vacation. Because he chose it, it will forever be my favorite of us. It remains propped up against the reading lamp next to where I try to sleep, and usually instead take in a great deal of good literature (and some so-so books).
Jim was frugal only with money. Perhaps that was an artifact of his family’s reaction to the swift dissipation of the first substantial sum he, the oldest of five children, ever possessed—the amount with which he had been entrusted for both necessities and incidentals during his first year in college. He was neither a traditionally demonstrative nor a lavishly-spending person.
Since his freshman year, when he blew two entire semesters’ allotted fortune ($500 in 1977 money) on a stereo system (kids: ask your parents), Jim had not spent large sums of money on himself or others–except on the exceedingly rare occasions when he would buy a house, which he excused as more of an investment (even though our timing, market-wise, was notoriously bad). Our growing family did, after all, require a place to put all of those books, and all of my fabric.
It was a rarity when my husband would spend enough money that it was worth mentioning to me . . . although there was the time I was startled that a man showed up on the doorstep of our new home, asking me for a check because he had “my tractor.” Jim forgot to mention the purchase. He had always wanted to be a gentleman farmer in his spare time. Continue reading “A Vale of Valentines”
Love in the Spaces 